With an increased use of computer technologies in almost every sector of the world economy, the need for high availability and disaster recovery within a computing infrastructure has also increased. A computing infrastructure generally should be made available at any time so that users may access the resources and data within the infrastructure, or receive continued services they are contracted to receive from the computing infrastructure. However, there are instances when a computing infrastructure or a portion thereof experiences some level of downtime; periods when a computing infrastructure is unavailable.
This downtime may occur when maintenance is performed within the technology infrastructure including, for example, patches to system software that require a reboot, or system configuration changes that only take effect upon a reboot. This type of downtime may be referred to as scheduled downtime, and is usually the result of some logical, management-initiated event. Downtime may also arise from some physical event, such as a hardware or software failure, or environmental anomaly. This type of downtime may be referred to as unscheduled downtime, and may include, for example, power outages, failed hardware components, an over-temperature related shutdown, logically or physically severed network connections, catastrophic security breaches, or various software failures such as failures in an application or an operating system.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.